- What's up, elite ThenX athletes, it's Chris Heria.
Welcome to another video of official ThenX.
Today I'm gonna be breaking down the benefits
of calisthenics, and why I encourage you to start.
(upbeat club music)
One of the first benefits of calisthenics
is that it's convenient and easy to get started
because most of the exercises do not require any equipment
or a gym membership.
Most of these exercises can either be done in your room
or a park nearby your home.
Another benefit is that most of these exercises
are compound movements, meaning several muscle groups
will be working together, which will lead
to burning more calories if you're looking to burn fat
and build lean muscle simultaneously.
Another benefit is that when working with calisthenics,
you're utilizing your body weight,
at least in most cases, and all of these exercises
stem from natural movements that also increase
your flexibility and your range of motion.
So when training calisthenics,
the maximal overload you're gonna actually feel
is the overload you technically feel every single day,
which is your body weight,
and what makes it difficult is the actual amount
of body weight you're using,
how you're targeting your muscles with it,
what angle you're doing it in, and so forth.
Whereas some weight training exercises may cause
stiffness and joint problems because of the constant
stress and overload that you put on your joints
with weights, and to really make gains with weights,
you're gonna need a whole bunch of weights,
so have fun bringing that around with you,
whereas if your body is the weight,
and your body is the gym, then you're just walking around
with 165 pounds to work with or however much you weigh,
which brings us to the next benefit,
which is that it's fun.
And not only is it fun,
but you can basically do it anywhere.
There's hundreds of movements and progressions to learn.
Really the only limit is your creativity.
You can practice anywhere, anytime,
and there are no age restrictions.
So if you think you're too young, you're too old,
you're too big, you're too small, there's no excuse.
There's always progressions to get started,
and you can always use a fraction of your body weight,
and slowly over time, you'll add more weight
on to these exercises, going on to harder progressions,
eventually utilizing your whole body weight in every rep
and really seeing your body start to evolve.
When you go to the gym, you have a whole selection
of five to 10 pounds of how much weight
you're actually gonna curl.
When you come to calisthenics,
and you're doing real pull-ups, there's no option.
You're pulling up your body weight every single time.
You're not pulling 20 pounds, 25 pounds, 60, 80 pounds,
every single rep is gonna be your whole entire body weight
distributed evenly between both arms every single time,
and if you really wanna take it to the next level,
you literally just take one arm away,
and you put all that weight onto one arm,
and that's how you increase the overload in calisthenics
versus going into the weight room
and just racking up a whole bunch of other plates.
And at the end of the day, you're either gonna be
racking on more plates,
or utilizing more of your body weight.
Both of them are gonna get you in shape,
but I'll tell you one thing.
The person that's doing the one arm pull-ups
is definitely gonna be able to lift heavier weights,
but the person that's lifting heavy weight
is not necessarily gonna be able to a one arm pull-up,
so with that said, I'm gonna show you guys some moves
to get started in calisthenics
and show you the evolution of how you can progress on
and really benefit from all this,
not just with a great physique,
but also with great abilities and true strength.
Alright, so when you're just getting started
into calisthenics, the first move you wanna be doing
for your chest and triceps is gonna be pushups.
Alright, so let's go for 20. (upbeat electronic music)
Alright, so a lot of people really neglect pushups
because either, one, they think it's too easy,
mainly because of how it looks,
or they'd rather be doing something else,
like bench pressing, and when it comes to the bench press,
let's say they'll put a plate on both sides,
that's probably gonna be about 135,
and they'll do, how many reps do you think, 20 reps?
I doubt it, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt.
Another thing that you're not gaining from the bench press
that you're gaining from the pushup is, one,
a muscle-body connection, you're connecting
all your muscles in your body,
and you're using your whole body to initiate this exercise
whereas when you're benching, you're lying down on your back
which is helping you focus more
to target your chest and your triceps,
but does that really help you in the long run?
When you did your pushup, you're using about 75 to 80%
of your body weight for 20 reps,
and you're activating those deep muscle fibers
as well as gaining a whole lot of body control,
and if you increase the angle and start leaning
more forward, you're gonna start to put more and more
weight onto your triceps and your chest.
So if you wanna progress on with weights,
you would just go ahead and add more weight.
If you wanna progress on with calisthenics,
you would go ahead and change the progression
or change the angle, or change the intensity.
So after you've mastered the pushup,
the next progression you would be going onto
is the explosive pushup.
Let's go for 15. (upbeat club music)
You can see there there's a lot of things to be learned
that you're not gonna lean from just adding more weight
on the bench press, and if you try this
while you're doing a bench press, I mean,
that's super dangerous, I wouldn't advise that at all.
So as you can see when changing the intensity
how hard you're pushing, that's also gonna increase
the overload on your muscles even though
you're using the same weight.
And when training explosive and giving way more effort
than you naturally would be in an exercise,
that's gonna condition you to be super efficient
at the normal way that you do that exercise.
In other words, if you're exploding when you do pushups,
then when you do normal pushups,
not only is it gonna be super easy, but you're benefiting
from that explosive training as well as the absorption,
the concentric part of this exercise.
And with any calisthenics exercise,
you can apply some explosive training to it.
So you can either get in your car, drive to the gym,
go to the bench press and add more weight,
or you can just take your pushups to explosive pushups
right here, right now, and what's after that?
Well, once you're able to do explosive pushups,
eventually with other progressions in the middle,
you'll be able to apply all your body weight
onto your chest and triceps, like the full planche pushups,
so you can go to the bench and add more weight again,
or you can do some of these.
(upbeat music)
Hoo!
So, you can either be benching, or you can be doing that.
I'm telling you, you're gonna have way more fun
doing that, and I don't care how much you bench,
you're not gonna do that if you don't train for it.
Alright, let's move on to another example
to give you guys another comparison.
When it comes to legs, whether you're doing weights
or calisthenics, you're always gonna start off
with squats, just body weight, because you need to learn
how to do it properly before even adding weight onto it,
so the very first step is gonna be just basic body squats.
Let's go for a quick 10. (upbeat club music)
Okay right there.
Okay, so once you mastered the squat,
it's time to increase the overload.
Now when it comes to weights, you would begin
to do barbell squats.
Now when you're first getting started,
you're probably gonna be somewhere around a plate
on each side, which is gonna be 135 pounds.
When it comes to calisthenics,
like I said before, you can increase the intensity,
the angle, the progression and so forth.
You can even subtract a limb to put even more overload,
all your body weight onto one,
so that's what we'll be doing now,
so instead of increasing that overload with a barbell,
which can actually lead to more problems in the future
if you're not doing it correctly
because of all that weight on top of your shoulders,
spinal injuries, back injuries, so forth,
for calisthenics, we're just gonna take out a leg,
we're gonna be working out with the same weight,
the same overload, we're just gonna isolate it to one limb.
Alright, so let's go for it, pistol squats. (upbeat music)
Alright, it's pretty simple, and as you can see again,
the calisthenics version, you have a lot more to learn,
a lot more to gain than just simply doing the same thing
and adding more weight.
As you can see when I do the pistol squat,
I'm using a lot more of my core, my whole core is fired up,
I'm using all my stabilization muscles,
I'm increasing my balance, strength and stability,
working deeper into my muscle fibers,
working more of that control, all simultaneously,
versus just increasing an overload.
And when you first get started,
it is definitely a struggle to keep your balance,
just to achieve a lot of the harder progressions as we go,
and that's what makes it so fun
is that you're always constantly being challenged
in new and different ways depending on which progressions
you go and what movements you're trying to master.
However for the legs, they do deal with your body weight
every single day, you're walking around every day
since the day you were born.
So these muscles are gonna be able to take over
a lot more of an overload than your upper body,
which is why I still would recommend
applying more weight onto yourself when working out legs,
like using a weight vest for example,
and a weight vest is something that you can use
for every single exercise in calisthenics,
but it's not 100% necessary, you can still get into
great shape, and you can still get super strong
with just body weight, so how do you take this one
to the next level?
Well, we subtracted a limb, we changed the progression,
now let's change the intensity,
so let's go for explosive pistol squats, let's go for it.
(upbeat club music)
Yeah, those are pretty fun, you gotta try those.
Alright, let's go for the next leg.
Hoo, so those are fun, so you guys get the idea.
You can increase the overload and work on the same stuff
for the rest of your life, or try something new,
work into harder progressions, start learning more
about your body, mastering your body,
then applying more weight onto your body,
taking it from there.
Enjoy your training, have fun, take it anywhere, anytime,
and you can get started right now.
So thank you guys so much for watching the video.
If you enjoyed the video, definitely smash
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And with that said, thank you guys again so much
for watching, let me know what you want the next video
to be about in the comment section down below,
and before I go, tonight at 12, in just four hours,
my second single will drop on all platforms,
Apple Music, Tidal, Spotify, the song is called
Feeling of You, guys, please check it out,
I'll appreciate it so much, and if you enjoy it,
definitely go ahead and follow me on iTunes Music
and Spotify, and I'll see you guys next Sunday.
Get ready for the music video coming soon.
Mad love, peace out. (upbeat music)